Roald Dahl

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.

Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.

I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Pain never really goes away; you just elevate and get used to it by growing stronger.

The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.